This essay is a compendium of the reactions to student writing over a long career,
the kinds of ideas that are notes on critiques of numerous papers, articles, theses, and especially,
dissertations. It is a set of principles and guide- lines for how to turn the product of political
science research into something readable. Or to put it in the negative, it is guidelines for how not
to have your work rejected because it is dragged down by the quality of your writing.
Writing is hard. At its best it is bringing intelligence—to the limit of what we have—toward clarify
ing a world that is messy in its natural state. None of us do it as well as it could be done. It is
a shame that writing is captured by the humanities and taught by those with humanistic inclinations,
because the artsy idea that it is “expressive” gets in the way of understanding that it is the appl
ication of highly disciplined intelligence.
Writing is thinking. The idea that one might have good ideas but be unable to express them is, I thi
nk, wrong. If you can’t express an idea, you haven’t had it. When your prose is muck, it is delusion
to believe that you have a clear understanding of a topic. If you’d had it, you could have written
it.
Writing is hard also because what you know about your topic is radically different from what a reade
r knows and also from what he or she wants to know. To succeed in communication, you must figure out
what the reader knows and wants to know. That means developing the discipline of reading your own w
ords, from beginning to end, and simulating the reality in the reader’s mind of knowing only what ca
n be known from your words, and in the order you have written them.
(Bad) writers often assert, “I know what I want to say and if the reader can’t
figure it out, that is his or her problem!” Wrong. It is your problem. Readers who can’t follow an a
rgument usually conclude that its author is not very smart. And, having been both author and reader,
I think readers are right. So, if you have this attitude, that figuring out what your prose means i
s the reader’s problem, change it or prepare yourself for professional failure.